All Been Crypto — Week 11 March 2024

Did you miss me? Apologies for the 2 weeks pause but ETH Denver was intense and of course the bull market taking its toll. I don’t have to remind you that we have by now hit new ATH in BTC thanks to euphoria and of course the constant inflows of TradFi money via the ETFs. BTC now hovering at the 69k line with multiple attempts breaking higher and retrieving leaving breathing room for ALTs to catch up. This week marked the full swing come back of silly season with MEME’s stealing the show and posting triple digit gains at some point looked like DOGE could be surpassing USDC in market cap. USDT bit 100bn and of course need to mention that Coinbase downloads are on the rise, a good proxy for retail coming back. But I don’t have to tell you any of that coz I’m sure you had your eyes on the prices as they go up. What you probably wana hear from me is some takeaways from Denver and themes for the year. Well let me put it this way it was a lot more bullish than last year, was too early to see frothiness in the marketing spend to see but anecdotally spoke with a friend who’s on the legal side of things helping projects off the ground and he said he made more money in Feb than past 12 month combined. Same is true for auditors and everything ancillary, VCs are deploying again, projects are spending and so the merry go round continues. The big themes were all around re-staking, Eigenlayer dominated the whole week speaking every day at an event and also Celestia and the modular blockchain/ DA (data availability) concept was hot. A couple of intellectually curious also discussed Dencun which is zooming in soon and how that will help L2’s scale much cheaper but generally felt like everyone was just chasing big airdrops and looking to farm points (that we are tokenizing now so not sure what’s the point then — excuse the pun). We are deep in bull market and also start to see new ‘stablecoins’ like Ethena gaining steam. Stablecoin in brackets because it’s not really one it’s a structured product tokenized (the basis trade with ETH) but popular because that trade in a bull market is very profitable and so them teasing an airdrop combined here with Exchanges pushing is given them the perfect mix for another lego that could represent systematic risk during the next downturn. But who wants to think about that now when you can just airdrop farm and gain >20% on your ‘stablecoin’. Hope you enjoy reading and the new ATH.

Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com

HEADLINES:

Financial Nihilism

Travis Kling struck a cord here which is why I’m putting his tweet as the pic of the week and the first article of this weeks. He explains very well why MEME tokens are the biggest use case for many new crypto entrants and why for some ‘gambling’ with them feels like the best rational choice they have available. It’s a lottery ticket where the odds are not drawn yet and you have a perceived influence. As we are in deep bull market this will only get crazier, for those that were around during 2017 ICO wait for the marketing spend these ‘projects’ will amass. And I’m making a bet here we will likely see Meme coins end up on regulators/politicians agendas this cycle too, just think how the headlines of Korean pensioners losing their live savings during the ICO bubble burst have shaped regulatory landscape there, this time it’s global and with funny picture tokens but same same. Someone will hold the bag at the end when the music stops.

ETH Denver Takeaways

Think Sage captured it pretty well with a bit more of a politically correct messaging so no need for me to reinvent the wheel here. Of course ETH Denver was massive 20k participants and something for everyone so recommend to dive into the recordings. It was also the first time we had a US presidential candidate endorsing and presenting there RFK Jr gave a closing appearance.

ETFs to ATH

After Fidelity Canda now also Blackrock also filed for adding BTC to their Global Allocation Fund, nobody of us is surprised except maybe how tightly this follows they playbook that was outlined. These bethemot TradFi Asset Managers of course want their multi asset funds hold their spot BTC ETFs.And its a lucrative business for everyone involved accumulated spot trading volumes for all BTC ETFs crosse 100bn this week.

Hong Kong draws 22 firms seeking crypto exchange licenses including OKX, Bybit and HTX

The city’s Securities and Futures Commission has received applications from 22 firms — including OKX, Bybit, Bullish, Crypto.com, Huobi HK, Matrixport HK and Gate.HK — before the application deadline of Feb. 29, according to the SFC’s website. HKVAEX, a crypto platform reportedly linked to Binance, also submitted its application. That’s a lot less than SG and notably all the major western players are absent but you got the whole Asia crowd here unsurprisingly.

QUOTES:

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